Modern Tapes makes excellent post-punk/new wave music. This is what I know for sure. The band’s Facebook page also tells me: “MODERN TAPES formed in a bomb shelter in 2010. They played and recorded underground for almost a year. They used equipment left behind by a past generation.” And there we are… quite the mysterious/romantic bio, no? Fortunately, the gang at All Things Go brought the Tel Aviv-based band to light, and now we all get to enjoy them!
I’m going to jump right to it with this one: Balto’s October’s Road is gorgeous. Goosebump-inducing gorgeous. The album, which is available on Bandcamp, is the work of Daniel Sheron and five of his friends (including Philippe Bronchtein of Hip Hatchet), and comes attached to a truly excellent origin story:
Balto came into being when Daniel Sheron abandoned his life in Moscow, Russia and went alone into Siberia. Against an ever shifting backdrop of railways and desolate wastes, he wrote a cycle of songs to tell the story of what had happened in that strange country, why he had exiled himself, and why he thought it mattered. In train cars and crumbling cities he encountered PEOPLE, and they inhabited the songs he was writing and the notes he was taking. In the fall, Daniel brought Balto back to America and called his friends to record an album in one day. On December 15, 2010, six people entered a basement in Brooklyn, New York and emerged that night with an album that no one had expected. October’s Road.